Joe J. K. Ó Ruanaidh and Thierry Pun,
Rotation, scale and translation invariant spread spectrum
digital image watermarking,
Signal Processing,
66, 3, pp. 303-317, May 1998. (Special Issue on Copyright Protection and Control, B.
Macq and I. Pitas, eds.)A digital watermark is an invisible mark embedded in a digital image which may be used for a number of different purposes including image captioning and copyright protection. This paper describes how a combination of spread spectrum encoding of the embedded message and transform-based invariants can be used for digital image watermarking. In particular, it is described how a Fourier-Mellin-based approach can be used to construct watermarks which are designed to be unaffected by any combination of rotation and scale transformations. In addition, a novel method of CDMA spread spectrum encoding is introduced which allows one to embed watermark messages of arbitrary length and which need only a secret key for decoding. The paper also describes the usefulness of Reed Solomon error-correcting codes in this scheme.